A secret diary in the 1980s, a bestselling book and now a TV show… Why are the
musings of an overweight, obsessive-compulsive teen so enduring? Diarist Rae
Earl talks to Sophie Davies.

‘Did the things that happened in my life make me mad or did they make me magnificent?’ muses the author Rae Earl. Heaven knows, life was miserable back in 1989, when the 17-year-old Earl wrote a diary while living with her mother – and her mum’s Moroccan bodybuilder boyfriend – in a council house in chilly Stamford, Lincolnshire. Recently released from psychiatric hospital, Earl was battling extreme anxiety, self-harm and an obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as being ‘five foot stumpy four’, ‘pushing 14 and a half stone’ with ‘a lover that made me look pregnant but actually ensured that I would never, ever become a teenage pregnancy statistic: Food.’

Now her hilarious yet hard-hitting journal has been turned into a television drama, My Mad Fat Diary, on E4. It may sound like an exercise in nostalgia, but with its focus on mental health the series is relevant today, as one in 10 people aged from five to 16 suffer from a diagnosable mental-health disorder in Britain. Of these, 290,000 suffer from anxiety, as did Earl. Indeed, in her upcoming book, 21st Century Girls (Orion Books, £12.99), the child expert Sue Palmer argues that if we don’t change our behaviour, young women’s mental-health problems will roll out of control.

It’s all a far cry from Earl’s current life in Australia, where she relocated four years ago seeking ‘a change’. Now 41, she opens the door of her spacious cottage in Hobart, Tasmania, looking cheery, calm and confidently standard-sized. Her Sydney-born husband, Kevin Johnson, tousled son Harry (three) and visiting mother potter in the backyard, where Earl’s writing shed shimmers in the sun. Tasmania is sweltering under a 41°C day and bushfires are burning across the state. ‘I used to have panic attacks going 50 minutes up the road to Peterborough, and now I live in the land of Kylie and Jason,’ says Earl, slightly shocked at where she’s ended up.

Digging out nine battered old red school exercise books, and some scrawled Filofax pages, Earl shows me her actual diaries, started in 1989 and continuing into the 1990s. There’s disturbing stuff in here about bullying, obesity and mental illness. But there’s also a typical teenage girl’s lust for love, life and boys, and the sharp writing and spirited attitude make for an uplifting read. ‘Black humour was my saviour. I was very aware I had to find a way to cope with my head,’ says Earl. The diaries proved the perfect strategy.

Rae Earl's original diary PHOTO: Loic Le Guilly

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Earl doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t feel anxiety, and as she hit her mid-teens it just got worse. She was wracked with paranoia, and what she now labels ‘intrusive-thought OCD’. ‘When the thoughts were bad, I used to burn my arms with match ends or hit myself in the face with a shoe. I just didn’t feel there was anything else I could do to get me through normal life.’ To rid herself of the painful emotions, she got caught up in exhausting rituals, from repeated hand-washing to constantly checking the door was locked or the gas was off.

In July 1988, aged 16, she really started to go downhill. ‘I complained daily that I was dying of different diseases – a burst appendix, meningitis, rabies or a stroke – and was living at the doctor’s.’ Despite seeing two child psychiatrists, she deteriorated. ‘I was constantly in a state of panic, convinced that God was punishing me, talking hysterical nonsense.’ No one could cope with her, and she wound up in a psychiatric unit, where she languished for a few days in the adult ward, before everyone agreed it was the wrong place for her.

Typically, one of her worst moments was when the batteries in her personal stereo ran out while she was there (a die-hard Morrissey fan, she found music a lifeline). She left uncured, but continued to see a psychiatrist and receive out-patient support.

Friends, Just Seventeen’s agony aunt and a life-changing gap year in Poland also helped Earl take control of her anxieties, and the weight eventually dropped off, but even when she hit a too-skinny 8st at university, she suffered from low self-esteem. ‘I learnt that fat is a state of mind. It’s the greatest female delusion that our lives will be better when we’re thinner.’ She still has bad days, but is now at peace with herself, though she admits, ‘It’s like being an alcoholic. The OCD never really goes away. It has to be managed.’

It was while working as a radio presenter with Kevin in Leicester that Earl first decided to run extracts of her diaries on air (luckily, he had previously convinced her not to burn them). ‘Floored by the amazing response’, she reworked the 1989 journal into a book, My Fat Mad Teenage Diary, published in 2007.

She originally intended it for an adult audience, but teenagers responded in droves, thanking her for helping them through their own tough times. ‘I’ve no problem with being what society would call slightly loony. I’d say to kids that, with the right help, you can be a very successful adult whatever your problems. I managed to go to Hull Uni and have a good career as a copywriter and radio presenter, despite the spectre of head bollocks.’

Celebrating everything from the Cambridge Diet to Opium perfume and the model/singer Nick Kamen, the 1980s nostalgia also attracted an older crowd. Earl refuses to see her 1980s musical influences as guilty pleasures. ‘Give me Rick Astley, Jason Donovan, Smash Hits.’ Spandau Ballet and the Thompson Twins were idols, as was George Michael. ‘Is he gay? Can we check? He hasn’t met me yet,’ she jokes. Earl adds that being overweight saved her from some of the decade’s worst fashions, such as the notorious ra-ra skirt.

Sharon Rooney as Rae and Dan Cohen (Archie) in E4’s My Mad Fat Diary

The E4 take on Earl’s book relocates the setting to the mid-1990s, when Oasis and Blur defined Cool Britannia. The drama makes Earl a little younger (16) and heavier (16½st), as well as changing the names of her posse for artistic and legal reasons. Earl is thrilled with the result. ‘I think it has real resonance – for adults or a 16-year-old. It takes on issues that haven’t been taken on before.’ The lead actress and former stand-up comic Sharon Rooney, 24, is ‘a revelation’.

Earl’s mother, played by Claire Rushbrook (Whitechapel, Secrets & Lies and, fittingly, Spice World), gets a hard time. The pair were often at loggerheads when Earl was growing up, but get on better now. ‘We lived in a council house, but she always told me I could be prime minister if I wanted to. Without my mum I’d probably be 25st and still writing poetry in my room. I needed some tough love or I wouldn’t have moved on.’

Talking of moving on, the seismic shift in teenage life thanks to technology really comes across in the series, with Earl forever stuck in phone boxes. But life wasn’t all bad pre-smartphones: ‘My bullies were physical. I knew where they lived and could plan routes to avoid them. Now they’d be in the palm of my hand. People say stuff online they’d never say to each other’s faces and a responsibility for compassion has gone out the window.’

Does the rise of social media spell the death of the diary? ‘I don’t care how confessional you think you’re being on social media, that consciousness of an audience means it’s very different,’ asserts Earl. ‘As long as there is teenage angst, lust and love, people will keep diaries. Nothing will replace the relationship you have with a book.’

Earl once wrote secretly at night; what’s it like exposing her adolescent angst as an adult? ‘Sometimes you want to go back and hug your teenage self. But we’ve all got a screwy inner 17-year-old.’ These days the diaries make her laugh, too, and she’s passionate about sharing her scars. ‘I want people to admit they’re not perfect. I call it being secure in your insecurities. Everyone’s got a kink, a messy bit of wiring. We’ve all got demons.’

Rae Earl (left of picture) with friends in 1990

So what would she tell teenage Earl now? ‘I still see fat girls everywhere labelled as “bubbly, with a nice personality”. I want to tell them that in the end it’s all OK. Sometimes the thing you feel ostracised for will be the thing that gets you ahead.’

Having taken a break from diaries at university, Earl started writing one again when she had her son. On the professional diary-penning front, she’s planning a prequel, charting the lead-up to her breakdown and a sequel revealing what happened to her main male crush (‘major twist’). She’s also about to release a young-adult fiction series.

While she’s flattered to be dubbed ‘Adrian Mole’s sister’, she’s quick to point out that ‘Adrian is a constructed, humorous character, Rae is real. I hope the series gives people a platform to say, “Yeah, I don’t feel very good,” because hidden mental illness is what’s so troubling.’

T’Pau and Twix: An extract from My Mad Fat Diary

Tuesday 24.1.89

• I’ve got this really mad urge to start a diary up again. I don’t know what it is but I think things are on the ‘up and up’ as it were. My last entry in my other diary was nearly two years ago. So what’s happened? Urmm…

• Record collection’s pretty impressive. Over 1,000 singles because of the record sale every three months where the bloke sells off ex-jukebox records for 10p. Half of them are scratched – my copy of China in Your Hand by T’Pau lasts less than a minute – but who cares?

• Had ‘diffy’ illness. OK, I lost the plot. Ended up in psychiatric ward 4 of Edith Cavell Hospital for the weekend – jigsaws, mashed potato and group exercises. I had to get out so I lied to them that I felt better. I know some of the stuff I think and some of the stuff I do is wrong as hell but I will never make the mistake of telling anyone what’s really in my head ever again. I don’t want to be locked up in a brown room with a personal stereo that’s run out of batteries and 58 copies of Reader’s Digest – it was as bad as it gets.

• I’ve still got ‘women’s problems’ but they keep fobbing me off by saying it’s my age. They say the same thing to my mum and she’s going through the menopause. So I’ve only got another 30 years of this. Great.

• Doing 4 A-levels. English. Politics. History. And Theatre Arts.

• Chloe is pregnant! Can you believe it? She has had to leave school and everything. She told me in the sixth-form toilets as she was sitting on a windowsill downing a Twix, like it was the most normal thing in the world.

• I’m fat – really fat. I’m fatter than Chloe and she is up the duff.

• The bloke out of Soft Cell has made a record with Gene Pitney!!! He’s so old my nan likes him!! It proves everything is going to s—.

I feel so weird! Perhaps I should wait for page 2. Oh, I want to be loved. Oh, it’s SO CORNY, isn’t it?! But I just want to be loved by a bloke that loves ME! I want to feel special, you know. I almost feel guilty for feeling it.

Every night I dream about it. Just someone special. I’d still be the same but I am fat and ugly and I don’t like pubs and parties where everyone gets pissed and throws up. I just long to be in bed with a bloke. It’s not like me but it’s how I feel! I want to do it. I want to be loved.

My Mad Fat Diary is on E4 on Mondays at 10pm. The reissued book of the same name, by Rae Earl, is published by Hodder at £7.99